thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 19a

"@MaartenvSmeden

Depressing to read so many COVID-19 prediction modeling studies done extremely poor. To lift my mood I’ll start singing about it! My new band is called Rage Against the Machine Learning"

NYT same article

Link

Reuters: "Hydrogen has long been touted as a clean alternative to fossil fuels. Now, as major economies prepare green investments to kickstart growth, advocates spy a golden chance to drag the niche energy into the mainstream of a post-pandemic world.

Green hydrogen was pushed to the fore last week when Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, said the technology was "ready for the big time" and urged governments to channel investments into the fuel"

Link

Marcus: "BEV people lie when they say 'infrastructure for EVs' already exists. It doesn't. The grid is not cheap to extend + or balance. BEV folks ignore system level costs. Hydrogen EV refueling model is cheaper"

"@physorg_com

Surfaces that grip like gecko feet could be easily mass-produced"

EU’s Energy Cief Simson: "Central to energy system integration is the deployment of new fuel sources... This has the potential to be a game changer,” Simson said. “It could act as an enabler, especially for the hard-to-decarbonise sectors like heavy industry and transport”.

Molecular energy carriers – or gases – are easier to use in sectors like heavy-duty transport where the weight of batteries makes electrification inconvenient. Molecules are also used as a feedstock for industries like steel-making or fertiliser production"

Link

He did well in PMQ as well. Looking more like a closer every day.

"@George_Osborne

The Labour Leader writing in the Daily Telegraph on VE Day tells you one thing - this guy is going to do everything he can to win"

Finkel: "I want my phone to take my complex questions, interpret them locally without ever seeking advice from a cloud-based server, and then anonymously reach out to the cloud to get the answers to what I need.

AI on my device, not in the cloud...

In fact, I know we have the capacity to ‘make it so’.

Last year, I attended a government summit called Techtonic hosted by Minister Karen Andrews.

It was there I first learned about Home Guardian, an Australian company with a very simple system that has the potential to revolutionise the aged care, disability and hospital sectors.

Using a world-first artificial intelligence device, Home Guardian uses sensors to monitor movement. It alerts carers or family members, via text message, if an unexplained fall occurs – all without being connected to the internet, without consulting an external server, without compromising privacy.

AI on my device, not in the cloud"

Link

AU Chief Scientist Finkel: "When I use my iPhone, I say 'Siri, call my wife, Elizabeth Finkel'. And Siri very happily replies 'calling Elizabeth Finkel'.

And it works really well, unless of course I am in an underground car park. In that case, Siri goes silent before sheepishly saying “Uh oh, I’m having trouble connecting”.

What this tells me is that the speech processing is not being performed on my iPhone.

Instead, my instruction goes to a server – a gigantic computer in the United States – that processes my words and sends them back to my iPhone as digital instructions rather than the original audio.

Nearly everything you do on your smartphone is stored, deconstructed and analysed by servers devoid of any morals"

Link

"Germany’s 83rd hydrogen station opens.. H2 Mobility, along with its partners Shell and Air Liquide, has opened Germany’s 83rd hydrogen refuelling station in Dortmund in the North Rhine-Westphalia region"

"@fuelcellsworks

APA Group Receives 2 Million dollar Funding for Renewable #Hydrogen Energy Trial in Queensland--1.1 dollar million in funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA)"

"@Airbus

In April 2020 we logged 9 net orders - taking our total net orders for 2020 to 299 aircraft so far. Last month also marked the delivery of 14 jets"

Wow. Some Indian students stuck in UK with no money no food?

Link

Roubini: "Market expectations of a quick recovery are "far-fetched"

Link

Nel reiterates positive long-term outlook in Q1 2020 results

Link

Muller-Plantenberg thesis: "However, studying the episode in a bit more detail, two kind of doubts emerge. The first one has to do with the way the exchange rate is determined in the Mundell-Fleming framework. The real exchange rate enters the model only in [some] equation .. as a determinant of the current account. However, how the exchange rate is itself set is not modelled explicitly. Essentially, what the model is telling us is that the exchange rate has to adjust itself at all times to obtain macroeconomic equilibrium and to ensure that the current account reaches a level compatible with that equilibrium.

The logic goes backward, not forward—similar to the argument one sometimes hears: 'We have a current account deficit. A deficit cannot go on forever but must revert to balance (or to some long-run equilibrium) one day. Therefore, the exchange rate needs to depreciate.' Most economics students find it hard to under­stand why speculators in the foreign exchange market should at all be bothered to please macroeconomists and to restore macroeconomic equilibrium in this fashion. And they are probably not alone."

Econ is a different beast of course. They are fukked at every level.

At high echelons of science if you have something good you will get your audience. If you didnt, there is something wrong with your theory, or something wrong with you. Don't try to appeal "to the public", "build a movement" who wont understand a f-ing word of your jargon anyway. Like this Sean Carroll guy and his theory... How will speaking abt it on a podcast help you with that, except self-aggrandizement, and/or more movie screenplay deals?

Good point.

"@skdh

If you want 'respect' from physicists, you have to live up to their quality standards. This means in particular showing that you either reproduce the successes of existing theories with fewer assumptions or that you can explain more data

'Physicists Criticize Stephen Wolfram’s ‘Theory of Everything’ - scientificamerican.com'"

Latest COV - increase at 2.53%. Russia looks bad.

Link

"China suspected of bio-espionage in 'heart of EU'" -- euobserver.com

"@anildash

For non-coders, a little explanation of why mobile apps from Google, Spotify, Apple, NYT, Venmo, Walmart and many others all broke for a little while this afternoon. (Short version: they all use code from Facebook, so when that broke, they all started crashing.)"

"@octonion

I fit a cubic model to my bicycling progression and I'll be biking 4000 miles/day by May 15"

"Internal Chinese report warns Beijing faces Tiananmen-like global backlash over virus"

Link

Tutorializing everything while learning helps. Then, for a new topic, check the existing tutorials support the new concept. If not there, major existing content reorientation, until it is.

Haha.. same page talks abt a documentary called "Meat the Future".

"Conventional [meat prod] methods rely on the intensive confinement [of animals] in unsanitary and inhumane facilities. These unnatural conditions require extensive use of antibiotics to address diseases that proliferate among the crowded, stressed animals, contributing to the spread of drug-resistant superbugs.

Since cultured meat is grown in a sterile environment, there is less chance for pathogens to sneak in. This decreases the need for antibiotics, as well as the risk of products containing illness-causing bacteria such as salmonella and listeria"

Link

"@maxsparber

Obi Wan: Your father was burned so badly that all his limbs just sort of fell off but we have such advanced technology like clones and robotics and such that we saved him.

Luke: What about my mother?

Obi Wan: Died in childbirth, literally nothing could be done"

I never took 911 too seriously. A few thousand dead? Sad but no WW level. Turned out it was an inside job anyway. Inside, as in "ally" (and some US deepsters). This thing much more deadly and serious.

#Scotland is uniquely placed to produce #hydrogen at a scale much cheaper and efficiently than most other countries”

Link

"@Jkylebass

The Ukrainian 'junk carrier' the CCP bought through a front company is now conducting 'operations' in the SCS. The junk carrier can only launch 8 planes before the first plane has to land again! It’s quite a circus stunt..not a real fighting vessel"

Booeeiinnnggggggggg

"Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover"

"@NuveraH2

The plunge in demand for fossil fuels is unprecedented. Renewables, by contrast, are holding up well. According to @IEA, #hydrogen stands out as one of the top technologies for economic rebound and future decarbonization"

Quick markdown based local rendering; I gen HTML with package markdown then trigger browser refresh on the local file with

xvkbd -window Firefox -text "\Cr"

Pierini: "[O]ne can’t ignore economic fundamentals. Turkey is a deficit country and relies heavily on the West, primarily Europe, for its export of manufactured goods, its import of technology, and its financial needs, both in terms of short-term and direct investment. China, Russia, and the Gulf countries are not alternatives to Turkey’s European anchor. Even when Qatar or China is willing to help Turkey economically, this is not commensurate with the country’s current financial gap. Besides, beyond hopes, a functioning European economic anchor requires two features that Ankara cannot currently provide—the rule of law as well as respect and dialogue"

Link

Mitt be diggin that grave, he is waitin, biding his time.. He wants to be there when it ends. He'll be there, he'll be like 'you were all up in my grill, Imma be up in your grill'.

When they axe 'what say you Mitt' he wants to go like 👎. Dead! 'Yeah Imma moonwalk up and down your ass mofoka. U dont know who you messed with...'

"@lindsaywise

Mitt Romney just came out of the GOP lunch carrying a poster board with a bar graf on it and the title: 'Blue states aren’t the only ones getting screwed'"

7 of 9 was on Picard. Or 2 of 2 nam sayin?

Boiinnnggggggggg.

They made her a lizzziiie, but little side comment she was straight on Voyager she got it on with the first ethnic US Indian. Now you made it to be like she was so turned off the bro she turned lesbo.

See you try too hard on Woke you go broke.

I think I am turning into a collector of good scifi, pre 2016 - it will be like an archeological dig after a while cuz a lot of stuff is turning into shit.

Oh yeah the Mambo

Trek Insurrection filmed partly around Lake Sabrina in the Sierra Nevada? Nice scenary.

"@BCAppelbaum

When the Reagan administration decided to stop enforcing the nation's antitrust laws, it started by allowing the consolidation of the meatpacking industry.

Seems as good a place as any to resume the enforcement of the nation's antitrust laws..."

"[Bancor's] Clearing Union would grant credit in the form of overdraft facilities. In other terms, each member would have the possibility of financing a trade deficit simply by entering a negative balance on its account. Symmetrically, a country with a trade surplus would have a positive balance credited to its account. Hence, for example, an export from country A to country B financed by the Clearing Union would give rise to the simultaneous registration of two entries of equal amount: a credit to the account of A and a debit to the account of B. Thanks to the centralization of all accounts at the Clearing Union, however, the credit and debit would not be bilateral, but multilateral positions, of each country vis‐à‐vis all the other members as a whole. In other terms, the surplus country A could spend its credit in bancor not only with B, but with any other member country; and B could reduce its debit by exporting towards any other country. In this way, the Clearing Union would be able, in principle, to finance international trade and its expansion, without the need of any given amount of money.

Bancor is not a fiat money. To be sure, it is created ex nihilo. And yet its creation does not depend on the decision of a central authority"

Link

"As if"

"@RickDeVos

It’s almost as if an entire system of perception & governance built to systematically bury ideas of limitations, trade-offs and imperfect arrangements under an avalanche of emotional rhetoric, fantasies, and engineered narratives would be ripe for slow motion, cascading failure"

"@maxberger

Nancy Pelosi has $46 million in real estate property she can fall back on during hard times.

The most generous read of her tepid response to the crisis is that she's out of touch with working people. The least generous read is that her interests are at odds with ours"

Education? All u need is a tablet with teaching material on it. Video lectures, ebooks, problems with solutions.

There can be a "school" but in a postmodern reincarnation it would mostly be a loungy area, a cross between a Starbucks and a mall. There can be play areas, study areas where some professional grown-ups can donate time as "groundkeepers" making sure kids are silent. They can be certified on the e-material as well, by the DOeD, so they can answer questions. But they should not teach. Feynman should teach your children not some random average jerkoff.

More here

"@stevenacook

Enlisting Turkey to counter or fight Iran is a fantasy"

Link

Seems like a usable camping light - The Fenix CL20R. Have been looking for something light, rechargable, and durable 4 some time... Went through many, one hi-tech prod sold as "chargable by sunlight" was totally not (inno funded by the Clinton Foundation, it figures), and two more weirdo gismos later, this looks good.

"@Joanna_Y_Lee

Took our time to get it right, but our COVID19 antibody test is finally out! Shows >99.8% specificity and 100% sensitivity"

"Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers" - vice.com

"Green light for hydrogen-powered homes in Scotland h2-view.com"

Link

"@fuelcellsworks

World’s First International Transport of Hydrogen from Brunei to Japan-Foreign-produced #hydrogen has arrived in Japan for 1st time from Brunei"

EGG DOG!

Brrr you know like brrrrr

The Y-scale is all wrong. They cooked this one up. Deutsche Bank, WTF?

I checked this rel, The 1929 rel broke, with the FED going brrrrrrrr

There. Paper saz minimum cost net flow is $O(m^{3/2})$ where m is number of edges. When sparse that'll beat Djiks.

Hmm. I bet shortest path prob as a minimum cost network flow, which in the backend solved as LP, implemented through log-barrier and solved in continuous realm with Newton steps etc works faster.

LPs are convex, solved problem.

Incidence matrix for SP is sparse. I've never seen such optimization probs taking more than 15 steps, so O(1). Sparse matrix inversion, banded, structured is O(n) (needed for Newton steps). So I bet that V^2 is beatable.

"@NetworkFact

Dijkstra's algorithm finds the shortest paths from a node s to all other nodes in a graph with non-negative edge weights. Run time O(V^2)"

We need bancor

"A University of Central Florida researcher and his team have developed an advanced new rocket-propulsion system once thought to be impossible.

The system, known as a rotating detonation rocket engine, will allow upper stage rockets for space missions to become lighter, travel farther, and burn more cleanly"

Link

"@JulieMac08

We just received amazing news about our friend .. receiving plasma from a donor with covid-19 antibodies & is responding well! He is not out of the woods yet, definitely has a long way to go but this therapy is showing promise!!!"

NYT: "The problem, Garrett added, is bigger than Trump and older than his presidency. America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals’ access to health care.

But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone, to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?

Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. 'The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns,” she said. “The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.'"

'That’s America?' I asked.

'That’s America,' she said.

Link

"@gregeganSF

So, a billionaire bought a disused underground nuclear missile silo and turned it into an inverted skyscraper/self-contained bunker full of luxury accommodation and video screen windows and now he and 57 other people have gone inside and shut the doors"

Link

Arschbombe

At 25:30 some globalist shit being peddled right there.. "globalism is here to stay". Really? Keyes had some good ideas , but Bam is the better closer.

Around 35:00 it gets f-ing nuts.

"Debate for US Senator from Illinois (Obama, Keyes)"

Link

CNN: "China can shut off the Philippines' power grid at any time, leaked report warns"

"@marcelsalathe

Today I learned that pure water freezes at -48C, not at 0C.

Not sure when I last posted something not COVID-related, but this seems sufficiently mind blowing, at least to me"

"@KarlreMarks

The best moment when people visit Lebanon with me is when they ask me what the traditional drink is and I explain that it's Pepsi"

"It is a well-kept secret, but we know the answer to life, the universe and everything. It’s not 42 – it’s 1/137.

This immutable number determines how stars burn, how chemistry happens and even whether atoms exist at all. Physicist Richard Feynman, who knew a thing or two about it, called it 'one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding'"

Link

"@biotequity

CCP19: Want to know the truth? DEMAND THE LAB NOTEBOOKS FROM WUHAN - all of them: cant be faked. And are page/date certain. ALL THE ANSWERS ARE THERE"

"@nntaleb

QUESTION

Given that 1) people stopped going to restaurants, 2) they kept eating, & 3) farmers are dumping produce, dairy, meat owing to a surplus nobody wants, could it be that restaurants, (because of their need to maintain variety & excess quantities) waste a looot of food?"

"@russian_market

North Korea and South Korea exchange fire"

"@raoulGMI

We’re about to have deflation and the market hasn’t figured it out yet"

Link

It's true. That's why I changed my publishing system, all content you now see are the product of text files, typed in a very simple markdown format, that I "check in" to my own local code repository. I sync that repo with a remote one, to publish, which has an added web page generation ability from that remote repo from markdown, but that func can be replicated elsewhere. The point is I own all the base content. It's all based on simple files.

Reading Snowden's book made me remember the good old times of the Net, I am also very much a product of that era as he is.

Snowden, Permanent Record - "Now, it was the creative Web that collapsed [after 90s], as countless beautiful, difficult, individualistic websites were shuttered. The promise of convenience led people to exchange their personal sites—which demanded constant and laborious upkeep—for a Facebook page and a Gmail account. The appearance of ownership was easy to mistake for the reality of it. Few of us understood it at the time, but none of the things that we’d go on to share would belong to us anymore."

"@ZaneGTCooper Replying to @timmaughan

I’m like 80% positive the pitch meeting was just Greg Daniels thinking of ways to generate revenue through native advertising and he eventually blurted our 'The Good Place, but computers.'"

"@NewYorker

'I have 773 dollars in my bank account. My rent is 958.65. I paid in April, but now I can’t,' a domestic worker said at the end of last month. Now, she is holding rent-strike meetings for nearly 200 renters"

Sadly my niggers are on the right-hand side of this picture.

"@Brad_Setser

One thing that I liked about @TheEconomist vulnerability index is that the countries at the top of the list map well to the set of countries with what I have called "fortress" balance sheets (more fx reserves than fx denominated external debt)"

"@joshua_landis

Nearly 2,000 Syrian Mercenaries Sent to Libya by Turkey Have Fled to Europe"

Billionaires of NY could be taxed more but centrist Dems are loath to do anything against their class interest.

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Gelman: "Still no data and no code"

Gelman: "Overall, the new [Updated Santa Clara coronavirus report] is stronger than the old, because it includes more data summaries and more evidence regarding the all-important specificity number."

Link

The math looks tight - PDF. I would forgo the analytic solutions just solve everything numerically. Data ref would be nice.

Muller-Plantenberg: "[Researchers found that ] a small set of variables–including the current account as a percentage of GDP, export growth, international reserves and short-term foreign debt relative to reserves–do a very good job in predicting the EMS crisis in 1992–1993, the Mexican crisis in 1994–1995 as well as the Asian crisis in 1997"

"Portugal plans new hydrogen plant in post-coronavirus 'green' future"

Wut - black ppl are dying at higher rates?

Link

Effin Russkies. We all know it, there is this sheer mental rawpower coming out of these muthafukkas, it is a joke almost in science circles. Boyd from Stanford was talking about a new area, says 'one day someone will find a result for it..' then says 'and I bet that person will be a Russian' half-jokingly and laughs. It's true. Is it the extreme cold..? Nothing else to do, either drink vodka or study.

"St Petersburg University students develop a hydrogen fuel cell ..

‘The most important thing for a catalyst is that it should not be very expensive and should have a high power output per square centimetre. You can increase this useful surface through porosity,’ explains Stepan Danilov. ‘Knowing this, we used nanostructured nickel. It resembles Raney nickel, but we managed to make the material even more porous. In order to further increase the activity of the catalyst, we introduced platinum nano points into it - they are so small that they have little or no effect on the cost of the fuel cell. This allows our project to compete with lithium-ion batteries in terms of price and performance.

The hydrogen fuel cell prototypes for quadrotors last two to three times longer due to their higher capacity. While the operating temperature of lithium-ion batteries ranges from minus 20 °C to plus 60 °C, the hydrogen fuel cells developed by the Hydrogen Express team have a much larger operating temperature range – from minus 60 °C to plus 80 °C.

According to the team members, modern hydrogen fuel cells are quite comparable in terms of safety with internal combustion engines, but unlike them and lithium-ion batteries, hydrogen fuel cells do not harm the environment"

Link

New PMI is out, major fall,

2020-03-01    49.1
2020-04-01    41.5

Anything below 50 is bad.

Since Manuf PMI is a leading indicator of GDP, expect that to fall further as well. So, that red line will follow that blue line. Then we get ka-booom.

When econ types go all hi-tech "solutionist" things get ridiculous fast. "People out of job - well I have a solution: asteroid mining" 🤪 A real quote from a serious author on a fin magazine.

"@Jkylebass

This is happening all over the globe. China threatened to withhold medicine to the US for the Wuhan Virus naming convention. They threatened Europe with the same for demanding an investigation into origins and actions of the virus. Now, they threaten on changing office name ?

'China threatens to halt medical supplies after Netherlands changes Taiwan rep office name'"

Link